HAVANA, Cuba, March 27 (acn) My purpose as an artist is to make life and spirit grow more beautiful, stressed maestro Manuel Mendive, one of the greatest artists of Cuban contemporary painting, a participant in the 10th Havana Biennial, scheduled for March 27th through April 30th.
During a press conference prior to the event, the artist focused on his exhibition at the important arts meeting which, he said, will be a chant to love, peace, and human spirituality.
On the expression of the Cuban nature in his works and what it means for him to represent culture from the archipelago in international events, he commented: “I’m Cuban, I’m black, and I’m proud of it. I have a lot of energy and the poetry of my ancestors, with which I can tell the world beautiful things from my country, my identity.”
Entitled “Spirit, Nature and Heads” Mendive’s exhibition is made up of paintings using acrylics on canvas, and other pieces worked in iron and wood. For the first time, he has included a pianist in the project, Pura Ortiz, who will play baroque music.
The artist conceptualized this work explaining that he conceives spirit as an invigorating energy; Nature as the big house; and heads, as something divine - the perfect things to create a great world of love and peace.
Colors, gestures, music, and sensuality will merge in the exhibition that Mendive will inaugurate on March 29th, as part of the Biennial, as well as the special performances he has also conceived.
The performances will begin with a tour beginning near the Saratoga Hotel, to the Prado Promenade and will end at the Orígenes Gallery, in Havana’s Grand Theater. Participating in this artistic action will be some 50 artists; among them some from Cuba’s Contemporary Dance Ensemble, the National Folkloric Group, and the Caribbean Dance Company, from eastern Santiago de Cuba province.
That building will be the venue of the exhibition of paintings and sculptures by the outstanding creator, which will be open to the public throughout the Biennial.
The work of Manuel Mendive, 2001 National Fine Arts Prize winner, is outstanding for the presence of a conceptual world where he inter- relates the environment, tradition, religiousness and syncretism of African antecedents.
The inauguration of the Biennial is scheduled for. Friday afternoon at La Cabaña Fortress and Los Tres Reyes del Morro Castle.
Old Havana’s San Francisco de Assisi Convent is the venue of the “Point of Encounter” project coordinated by painter Alexis Leyva (Kcho) bringing together prominent artists from various parts of the world to create, inspired by the most acute challenges humanity is living through.
Besides the Morro-Cabaña Cultural Complex and Old Havana, the municipalities of Vedado and La Lisa, and other public places in the Cuban capital will also be venues for the event.
Under the slogan “Integration and resistance in the global era”, this 10th edition of the Biennial, a fiesta of contemporary art from Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia and Africa brings together over 300 artists from 54 countries, among them Cuba, with 120 artists from different generations and creative tendencies. Brazilians Flaminio Jallageas and Patricia Gerber, and South African Jane Alexandre are among foreign participants.
On Thursday four excellent collateral exhibitions of were inaugurated at Havana’s Museum of Fine Arts as part of the Biennial: Supervivencia, by Roberto Fabelo, Equipaje perdido, by Esterio Segura, La Enmienda que hay en mí, by Carlos Garaicoa and Resistencia y libertad, by Cuban maestros Wifredo Lam, Raúl Martínez and José Bedia. Attending the opening were Culture Minister Abel Prieto, the Biennial’s president, Rubén del Valle, and numerous national and foreign artists, art gallery representatives, curators, art critics, and art lovers.
During the ceremony, it was announced that on March 28th, the exhibition ‘Chelsea visits Havana’, which includes works by 32 US artists, will be opened, also at the Museum of Fine Arts.
A look at unknown artists from nations of the South was what germinated the essence of the Havana Biennials, which began in 1984 and that, since 1989, include theoretical events on contemporary art and on other no less important issues.
Tradition and modern times; Challenging decolonization; Art, society and reflection; Individuals and their memories; Communication; Art and Life; Dynamics of Urban Culture; and Integration and Resistance have been, in that order, the themes or principles of previous Biennials.
In this globalized world, Cuba, also hit by the world crisis, once again opens its doors to contemporary art and to the artists, with their own identities.
(Comienza programa de la X Bienal de La Habana)
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